Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) (22 page)

Akemi nodded silently. Then her image and that of the other four captains disappeared. Behind him Denise sniffled.

“I want one of your cigars, Captain Jack. And some of that Scotch. Maureen can keep her black ale!”

Max, Elaine, Maureen and he laughed at their redhead’s reaction. Though tears showed on the young woman’s face, her comments were combat normal. All too normal.

“A cigar you will have!” he told her, looking back to the front screen and the ship scope’s reddish-brown image of Sedna that now occupied part of the screen. “And please, smoke it before this Menoma and any damned Alien we meet on Sedna!”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

On board the
Uhuru
three hours passed with drinking, cigar smoking, curse sharing in Gaelic and in Polish, family memories shared and plenty of visits to the ship’s automated Food Refectory at midships. Sitting there at a table just large enough for the five of them, Jack scanned his crewmates as they ate steaks, gobbled green grapes, reduced the level of his Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch bottle and eyed a defrosted cheese cake that had streaks of black raspberry through it. High energy food it all was. And it was the best meal they had each had since leaving 253 Mathilde. The ship intercom bonged just above his head, its ceiling emitter placed just right for banging into it if you stood up wrong. He looked to Denise, who sat to his left.

“We’re all here. Who the hell is calling?”

Their young lady pulled at one red braid, sat back, then spoke to the device’s expert software. “Comlink, transfer AV sound and image to Food Refectory wall screen.”

Jack, a Maureen dressed in a tight leotard that did nothing to hid her slim good looks, a jumpsuited Max, Elaine in her wool body stocking and Denise all looked to the Refectory’s rear wall. The flat screen filled with an image they all knew.

“Hullo,” called the Afro-Hispanic face of Júlia Araujo. Behind the woman moved the three crew folks of her
Caiman
ship. “Captain Jack, we have a question that Akemi said you should decide.”

“Yes?”

Júlia gestured to her comlink person and a second image joined hers in the AV signal. It showed the Alien building at the north pole of comet 1999 DG8. “The blockhouse is still intact. It was not damaged in the recent battle, and ship debris missed it. What are your orders?”

Jack sat back in his sling chair, a support more comfortable than solid plastic or metal. “Destroy it. Use geo-penetrator rockets like we’ve done before. And record its destruction. I plan to have an AV disk imager attached to my suit when we enter the Alien hangout on Sedna, so I can share our battle history with the Aliens we encounter.”

The Brazilian woman smiled easily. “That was Captain Akemi’s guess. Does it matter to you which ship does the deed?”

What the?
“Of course not. But why ask? If
Caiman
is closest in orbit, which our NavTrack last indicated, your ship could handle the matter.”

The woman who had started out as a maid to Governor Aranxis on Ceres Central, then attended the Unity Flight School on Deimos, after which she returned to the Asteroid Belt and became admired for her NavTrack computational abilities, that woman grinned wide. “Well, our ships have been debating over whether to have a competition among ourselves over who gets to take that shot. Steaks, booze, rare coffee beans and some fancy aquamarine gems have been tossed into the pot. Do you mind?”

Jack almost choked on the steak he was trying to swallow. “Mind? Hell no! Have at it!”

“We will!” Júlia said. The smile left her face as she turned formal. “Captain, our ships have scavenged three workable gravity-pull drives from the three disk-ship hulks. The hulks will shortly be deorbited. But we also recovered two Alien bodies, which
Leopard’s
medoc wishes to vacfreeze. Do you wish to see the images from
Leopard’s
body recovery?”

Everyone in the room stirred at this news. Maureen in particular looked interested. As did Max, Elaine and Denise. He gestured at the woman. “Captain Júlia, yes, please transmit the AV imagery. On a piggy-back to your signal.”

“Here’s the imagery,” she said, her Portugese-accented English sounding . . . bothered.

On the Food Refectory wall screen there appeared the rad-burned body of their newest Alien predator. Jack thought it looked ugly.

A Komodo dragon reptile it resembled, although its four limbs had evolved into two heavily muscled legs with splayed feet, and two red-scaled arms that ended in hands with five finger-claws. Two golden eyes sat atop the bulging head dome, while side indentations suggested ears of some sort. But it was the colorations of the middle and upper body that most stood out. Stripes of yellow, orange, red and black encircled its stocky body. While bipedal in basic form, it most resembled a torpedo ready to launch out and sink its yellow dragon teeth into whomever it attacked. Jack noted how Kasun’s two crewman were both dressed in EVA outfits as they stood to either side of the Alien so they could hold it upright in the one gee ship gravity of
Leopard
. If this Alien at all resembled the ground-bound lizards of Komodo Island, then its mouth secretions would be loaded with deadly bacteria and toxins.

“Looks like a bipedal coral snake,” said Denise, although her freckles looked pale against her face.

“Damn that’s disgusting!” muttered Max from across the table.

“Agreed,” said Elaine, who looked to the adjacent image of Júlia. “Captain, any evidence on board the disk-ships of females? Or eggs? Or small offspring?”

“None,” said Júlia as she waved to her out of sight Comtech. The Alien Komodo dragon disappeared.

“Good,” said Maureen in a tone that suggested she would have personally shot any such survivors. “Júlia, how many crew on each ship? And any evidence on their bridge of a Comlink for ship-to-ship talk? Or maybe long distance talking?”

Jack folded his hands, giving thanks again for his luck in Maureen choosing to join their crusade early on. Her mind followed his worries on a one-to-one basis.

The
Caiman’s
ship-owner and captain bit her lower lip as she gave thought to the question. “Five Aliens per ship. And the bridge for each ship was identical. We took holo imagery of it, as your ships have done during prior encounters. The bridge layout was a low central pedestal with a round seat cushion, surrounded by four other round seat cushions. Each cushion was faced by control modules that seem to be similar to our touch panels, since we cannot see any screen images or switches. But the central pedestal also had two devices flanking the captain’s seat. One was a flat-topped pole thick as my thigh. The other resembled a round metal cake atop a square metal block. My Drive Engineer thinks the metal block is their engine controls. So, the solid pole could be some kind of comlink. Shall we salvage it? It will require a plasma torch to separate from the bridge’s floor.”

“Yes!” Jack thought about how the Komodo dragon disk-ship layout differed from the usual human arrangement of function stations arranged in parallel rows. Did it indicate a parent at the center, surrounded by adult offspring? A family flying each disk-ship? Whatever the arrangement meant, it was just one of many questions he had for this Menoma at Sedna. “Captain Júlia, thank you for an excellent job done on scavenging these hulks. Good luck on your ship winning the blockhouse demolition rights!”

The dark-skinned woman smiled big. From the background of her bridge came the sounds of Calypso music. “My crew and I are just happy we pulled a grav-pull drive onto our ship. As did
Leopard
and
Mongoose
. We will be ready to set vector for comet Sedna within a half hour. Other questions?”

“None,” said Jack, waving at the highly competent woman who had left three high-school aged kids on Mathilde to join his anti-Alien crusade. “Go share with your fellow captains. As I need to share with Captain Akemi.”

“
Caiman
out,” she said, her image vanishing from the Refectory wallscreen.

Maureen fixed her tough as steel gaze on Jack, rather than on the shot glass in front of her that still held some Johnny Walker Black Label. “Captain, you realize that Akemi’s choice to call you
shogun
means she expects you to behave as an ancient Japanese battle leader or
daimyo
?”

The sling-chair felt comfy in the one-gee of the Food Refectory. Around them Max, Denise and Elaine returned to eating their steak and greens dinner. He wondered just what Maureen meant by her comment. “So? I am complimented by her
shogun
words. But I’m just a Belter Hopper guy whose grandpa taught him a few tricks.”

“Hardly,” Maureen said, her hair-fine wrinkles gathering into a friendly smile. “We have won every battle you’ve led us into. While we lost two good people, we have not lost any ships. And we Hunt well together. Anyway, my Military Historian side says we have been both lucky, and that there is more to this arrival of Alien social predators in Sol system than we yet know. So will we just attack Sedna with thermonukes, as I suspect Akemi expects you to do, or will we drop in on the Alien version of a gathering spot to learn more about this interstellar society of tiger-like predators?”

Everyone now looked at him, especially his sister Elaine. He let loose with a burp, which fooled no one. “Grandma Maureen, why do my choices have to be either-or? Or limited to two courses of action? Recall the mention by the Gyklang of colony ships parked in orbit about Sedna? Why are the females and offspring of each species parked
there
, rather than above their comet bases? And recall how this Menoma person is selling info on Earth and on this fleet’s actions? What does he get for doing that, beyond some baubles? As for destruction, we are only down two thermonukes, out of our inventory of twenty-eight. And while the torps are default set to explode at ten megatons, they have adjustment verniers that allow the yields to range from five to thirty megatons. Tell me, do you think a thirty megaton thermonuke would crack open the solid ice eggshell of Sedna, exposing the inner ocean waters to low Kelvin temps?”

Maureen smiled slowly. “Oh. Oh my. I do love your sneakiness. Your grandpa Ephraim would have loved to have had your help during the Battle of Kirkwood Gap!”

“He told me a lot about the prior battles, before he died while ramming that Unity frigate. And the locations of three thermonuke stockpiles are not the only Belter Rebellion secrets he shared with me.”

Maureen now looked envious. “Care to share some of those secrets?”

“Not yet. Maybe later.” Jack shrugged. “Meanwhile, I need to talk to Akemi. So, let’s finish up this meal. We’ve got a trek of fifteen AU to arrive at comet Sedna, which now orbits Sol at 78 AU.”

Max stood up, one hand uplifted with a tumbler of Scotch in it. “A toast! A toast to Jack, our leader and a predator unlike any these Aliens have ever met!”

Jack sighed. Then flopped out of his sling-chair to hold his own Scotch up in salute. “Three cheers for humanity!”

Everyone drank to that. And everyone knew that a deadly moment of truth approached.

Jack had sidestepped Maureen’s questions about battle tactics because, in truth, he operated more by instinct than by set plans. The intense reading he had done about humans as social predators said that a key adaptation in allowing humans to dominate Earth had been the human ability to adapt quickly to rapidly changing environments. A second key adaptation had been the ability to talk, communicate and scheme with other humans to make richer the spoils to be had from taking over someone else’s eco-niche. He suspected these newly arrived Aliens had abilities similar to those of humans. But they also had a salutary weakness. Unlike humans, the Aliens had yet to create an alliance of multiple Alien species to act in unison against humanity. Humans had done that often in their history. As they were doing now by joining together into Akemi’s killer whale pod. He could not help but wonder if Alien social predators were never vegetarians, but always meat eaters. If so, his freezer crates of elk and cow steaks would be a fine trade item. And a useful tool for distraction as he and his fellow captains marched into Sedna’s meeting place.

As Jack’s fleet drew within one AU of Sedna, his ship’s scope showed them what no human had ever before seen. Before them appeared a giant comet that was planet-like in roundness, red as Mars in its surface color, and with low basins separated by crusty ridges all across its Sol-illuminated surface. The front screen also held the AV images of his six fellow captains in a strip across the screen top. The rest of the screen showed the scope’s live light imagery, and anything else Jack, Denise, Max or Elaine chose to throw up on it. Maureen’s holo glowed just above Jack’s Tech panel, but she too saw what they saw by way of a repeater signal to her Battle Module station.